March 1, 2018

Nordic consortium to build Reykjavik’s first data center

The facility aims to provide secure hosting services to banking and financial institutions in Iceland.

DC Blox

A Nordic consortium including Opin Kerfi, Vodafone Iceland, Reiknistofnun Bankanna (RB) and Korputorg Real Estate will be building a first-of-its-kind large-scale data center in Reykjavik, Iceland. This data center facility is being built in a bid to provide safe hosting services to banking and financial organizations.

According to the consortium, the data center facility will occupy approximately 540,000 sq.feet of space. They also say that the first customer of the data center facility will be Reiknistofnun Bankanna themselves, the IT Service Center for the Icelandic Financial Market.

The consortium says that Iceland’s position as a data center facilitator is gradually growing in the international market. They further added that the reason for this growth can be attributed to their environment-friendly approach, free cooling and renewable electric power sources.

Speaking about building the facility at Reykjavik, Thorsteinn G. Gunnarsson, CEO of Opin Kerfi, commented:

It is fantastic to launch a datacenter in Reykjavík where key conditions are in place for the development of high-tech environments that require extraordinary capacity. Excellent access to services, infrastructure and safe delivery of green energy is effortless with direct connection to one of the city’s main power stations.

Sharing similar sentiments about the data center to be built, Fridrik Thor Snorrason, CEO of RB, commented:

The facility is tailored to RB’s demanding requirements but the Icelandic financial sector has over the last two and a half decades been built around real-time payments, where there is no tolerance for down time.

The project advances the competition both locally and internationally by ensuring that leading-edge data centers will be built here in Iceland. This is a secure and cost-effective solution that will be highly attractive to both domestic and overseas customers.